After working on some influencer identification product reviews and stories recently, I decided it might be useful to compile a list of influencer discovery tools for your use. If I’m missing any software platforms or services in this list, please drop a comment or send me an email and I will update as needed. Consider this an ever-growing resource and bookmark it or share with your networks. I promise to update it and annotate it as needed. This list is not (yet) comprehensive. Please help me build it.

Influencer Identifcation Tools

The following software platforms and services offer the ability to identify online influencers and voices in the social media space that your company or brand may want to reach out to for your marketing efforts. We’ve tried to note general pricing and qualifications to their services but rely on the companies and readers like you to help us keep the list updated. They are listed alphabetically.

BackType – Offers cursory influencers from an aggregation of data from various social outposts for company pre-determined topics. Open topic search version in private beta. Price: Cursory company listings free.

NinjaOutreach – Prospecting and outreach software, has its own database of bloggers and influencers (Twitter/Instagram). Uses different APIs to show SEO metrics, social media followings and shares to help track how popular a blogger or influencer is. Starts at $49/month.

Empire Avenue – Social networking game structure that allows businesses to connect with individuals on what it calls “value relationships.” Fun, consumer-facing approach allows you to “buy stock” in social profiles. The system then displays relative value of individual influencers.

Fast Company Influence Project – One-time “contest” conducted by Fast Company to rank the most influential person on the web. Visual graph of 32,000+ users with larger images representing larger influence. Price: Free.

Infinigraph – Market research tool focused on defining strength of user connections to brands, affinities and social activities. Uses an algorithm to rank social connections (fans) based in influence and potential impact. Feature set includes an aggregation, curation and distribution model which helps brands find and share content with audiences. Price: $2,500 per month to start.

Klout – Score-producing, public face that measures an individual’s ability to move their networks to action. Company works with brands off-line to deliver more holistic insights about an individual’s influence. Price: Website score generation free. Company engagement requires custom pricing.

Kred – Score-producing, public face much like Klout that offers an influence score and an outreach score. Users can add off-line activities to enhance their score along with online metrics.

Listorious – A Twitter List indexing site that organizes community-produced Twitter lists into categories. Search for lists around your niche or industry and find relevant Twitter users in the subject matter. NOTE: Listorious was purchased by Muck Rack and is now folded into its journalist-PR product offering.

mPact – Dashboard shows top 10 influencers by default, but allows drill downs with no limits on what you can find. Allows competitor tracking as well and contrasts influencers in different categories. Features publicly available data on individual influencers and additional public relations/marketing aggregation information(editorial calendars, speaking opportunities in category, etc.) Price: $42-$250 per month.

Onalytica – Influencer identification and cursory CRM package out of Great Britain that claims to track and categorize conversations on Twitter and beyond. Price: No pricing available on its website.

Peer Index – Twitter influencer tool. Has a business features set to launch in early 2011. Price: Score individual handles for free. Custom business prices: Not listed.

Postrank Topics – Community manicured blog rankings by topic and based on engagement. Price: Free.

ReSearch.ly – Offering from PeopleBrowsr allows array of topics and search-based filters to identify mentions of search terms on Twitter. Allows for Twitter interaction and offers conversation metrics around topic. Price: Free trial extended when you publish a result link. $99 per month for the paid version.

Social Snap – A social media measurement software with a built in influencer identification and prioritization component.

Technorati Authority – The original influence measure, Technorati’s authority score (the green number associated with a given blog on Technorati.com) is a count of the unique sites that link to a given blog in the last six months. So comparing a list of blogs to one another, you can see which has the most unique websites connecting to it. Unfortunately, Technorati does not have an easy way to organize or filter blogs by authority score within categories, so comparisons are manual. Price: Free

TweetBig – Twitter-specific management toolset that offers a “red carpet finder” to see who has the biggest and most influential audience among your followers. Also has a follower gathering/recommendation device that suggests followers based on your keywords or topic areas.

TweetLevel – Edelman project that produces overall Twitter population list that can be filtered by influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Intended to measure a person’s importance on Twitter. Price: Free.

Twitalyzer – Twitter analysis of network, reach and impact. Individual profile page displays a person’s Twitter network and cursory bio information. Deeper dives in paid features show influencers within a person’s network. Price: Individual plan is $4.99 per month. Business plans are $29.99 and an agency offering is there at $99.99 per month.

TwitterGrader – HubSpot’s grader softwares were originally intended to be ego plays. But the refinement of the tool for Twitter and addition of the Twitter Elite lists (which rank the top users by city, women and more) makes it a handy tool for identifying big-impact Tweet-ers.

About the Author

Jason Falls

Jason Falls is the founder of Social Media Explorer and one of the most notable and outspoken voices in the social media marketing industry. He is a noted marketing keynote speaker, author of two books and unapologetic bourbon aficionado. He can also be found at JasonFalls.com.

Jeremy Guevara

While the influencer marketing platforms and services mentioned focus on renting or contracting influencers, one influencer source all brands have that often goes overlooked is their existing customer base. Mavrck (www.mavrck.co) enables brands to discover and activate their existing customers with influence to share branded content on social at scale, converting their friends at a higher rate than other influencer categories and paid social ads.

Mr Falls, hope all’s well. Am working on a new project and building an influencer plan, noticed that quite a few of the esteemed tools above have ceased to be, gone to meet their er.. maker… hmmm Monty Python doesn’t work in this rambling paragraph afterall. Would it be possible to identify those that have shuffled off this mortal internet? Tweetbig, Twendz, Tweetlevel? etc.

Thanks Jason – at present, we offer influencer identification (keyword/hashtag based) as well as an influencer management/engagement platform (Saas).

Onalytica IRM is a CRM tool for managing influencers, which allows brands to scale and track their influencer marketing programs by surfacing engagement opportunities and measuring the impact of influencing activity. In terms of influencer identification, we take in and analyze both Twitter and website data to calculate stakeholder influence within any given topic using a similar method to PageRank. Pricing is currently on request.

Hi Jason, hope you will check out Social Snap. We have a very unique Influencer Identification system which is based on several different scoring factors with a heavy emphasis on relevance to a brand or brand category.

I see you don’t have Appinions on the list. We’re a little bit different in that we identify influencers exclusively around user defined topics by using natural language processing. We filter out noise makers by only identifying influencers whose opinions on a topic have an impact, with people taking action around that opinions. That platform is not social media focused; we look at 4.5 million sources ranging from TV and radio transcripts, to social media, traditional media, and new media sources. I’d love to find some time to give you an overview of the platform at your convenience.

Amazing write-up! This could aid plenty of people find out more about this particular issue. Are you keen to integrate video clips coupled with these? It would absolutely help out. Your conclusion was spot on and thanks to you; I probably won’t have to describe everything to my pals. I can simply direct them here!

Hi Jason! Fantastic list, surprising for the wealth of options out there, and not surprising in the sense that I think we all get used to the fact that there are so many things out there that we’ve never heard of until we do the research, and read excellent write-ups like these.

One question for you – I wondered why Technorati’s Authority calculation didn’t make the list. It does seem to meet the criteria you laid out, and overlaps the functionalities of others that made the list. Thanks!

Great point. I’ll go back and add them. I suppose it didn’t make the list
because Technorati has never improved their delivery of that metric, made it
easy to organize or search and, as a result, I’d forgotten it existed. (Says
more about them than me, in my opinion.) But great catch.

Jason thanks for including @infinigraph the best list we have seen!! Please consider

Infinigraph – Social aggregation, curation and syndication web based technology allowing brands to engage audiences with real-time content and social relevance. They also focused on defining strength of user connections to brands, affinities and social activities leveraged for Facebook ad buys Likes/Interest selection. Price: $2,500 per month to start.@chasemcmichael

Thanks Virginie. Twitalyzer is on the list. Social Mention is not a tool that focuses on identifying influencers. While it does offer a list of potentially influential sites around the keywords you are searching for, the list is cursory and basic. I'd classify them as a social media monitoring solution and don't feel like they'd be on this list.

But it's certainly a welcome suggestion. I probably need to curate a list of monitoring solutions, too, but Ken Burbary has already done a pretty nice job of that here:

The one thing I do find in SocialMention.com is the users and tags around social bookmarking sites, like stumbleupon to be very helpful in identifying various tags around a brand, keyword or competitor.This provides users as well, that have tagged content around the 3 areas, and allow for the identification of “possibles” as Influencers. It's a good starting point.

I like this list, Jason! Some great stuff on here. I also like what Terametric is building right now and how they help identify influencers in your community and also influencers by industry, product & brand on Twitter. They help you see people you should be engaging with.

janetaronica

I like this list, Jason! Some great stuff on here. I also like what Terametric is building right now and how they help identify influencers in your community and also influencers by industry, product & brand on Twitter. They help you see people you should be engaging with.

Great initiative. I like Listorious, TopRank, NetworkedBlogs, and blogging awards/recognition posts are great ways to find influencers. In fact, I found your blog via Social Media Examiner's list of top social media blog finalists: http://bit.ly/fHs8w9.

As the tools all vary so much it's important to assess what you want to achieve from your influencer marketing strategy as this will help you identify the right tool, or tools, for your needs.

And don't underestimate the value of human input – as we found from our “road test” of various social media monitoring tools (http://bit.ly/dNX9V5) they all have different strengths when it comes to influencer identification but they all needed human analysis in order to make the most of the data and the results.

The ways I measure influencers is how much does they content they publish help me or stimulate thought. Right now, I feel like the tools used to measure influence are too subjective and all use their own metrics and algorithms.